Some Churches Holding Palm Sunday Services in States Across US: Reuters' Documentation, April 5, 2020

Editorial Board: A response to "We Are An Easter People"

While clearly a cri de coeur from those who, like we, desperately miss the sacraments, we strongly believe that much of what the message advocates is ill advised and, worse, could cause great harm.https://t.co/4BqWnSPzuy pic.twitter.com/blmWkxY2H7

— Our Sunday Visitor (@OSV) April 4, 2020

Despite huge red flags waved in front of their unbelieving faces, there are still people who want to maintain that religious gatherings are not being held in the US in defiance of stay-at-home orders, since everyone they know is participating in religous gatherings online. These folks remind me very much of an elderly German woman I saw interviewed in a documentary this week who vowed that, no, sir, no one was murdered during the Holocaust, that the gas chambers and crematoria were fake news — and as she spoke, the camera panned to actual footage of the crematoria stuffed with ashes and bones, and actual photos of people who had been shoved into mass graves after they were shot by the Nazis.

Quote for Day: Right-Wing Evangelical Churches Want to Resist Closing Services — But Risk Killing Off Their Congregations

David Neiwert, "Evangelical churches run smack into coronavirus' lethal reality, but some continue to resist"

David Neiwert writes,

Evangelical churches with a right-wing, Christian-nationalist political bent really want nothing more than to resist government orders to cease holding services during the novel coronavirus pandemic. The main drawback is that there’s the possibility of killing off their congregations.

Must-Reading As Papal Visit Nears: The Economist on "Unholy Mess" of Finances in U.S. Catholic Church

For anyone asking why so many Catholics have walked away and continue to do so despite the "Francis effect"; for those with serious concern for the future of the Catholic church; for those who care about the effectiveness of the church in proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to the world:

Travails of Aging Travelers, and More Weeping in Gethsemane

I spent yesterday in purgatory. Which is to say, we were flying—hither and yon on overheated airplanes whose seats grow smaller every time I fly. (I refuse to entertain the possibility that my posterior is growing larger . . . .)

And as we did so, I was struck by the aging of the flying population, yours truly included. I don’t know if the economic downturn has anything to do with this, or if it’s simply a demographic fact: the baby-boom generation is aging, and it’s noticeable as we travel.

First leg of our trip, it turned out that not one but multiple passengers ahead of us had chosen the wrong seats, causing a maddening comedy of errors as everyone tried to identify his/her correct seat and find it. All this was made more comic by the fact that these were all elderly Southern folk like me (headed to Atlanta, bien entendu), determined to out-polite everyone else. So first one and then another wrong-seater made offers to switch seats for the convenience of others, resulting in a down-the-rabbit-hole set of calculations about who should sit where, which not even an expert mathematician could have brought to an accurate conclusion.

All this as passengers waited patiently behind the politely haggling bunch to be seated, and the flight attendant bellowed over the microphone for people at least to stand inside their seating areas to let folks by until they had resolved the mess. Steve and I chuckled, but as we did so, I realized with a bit of shame: these folks are not so much older than I am. Where they walk today, I will walk tomorrow, God willing that I have tomorrow.

So it behooves me to muster a modicum of understanding.

And then the understanding I mustered just as quickly vanished, when a flight attendant who should have been at home with her feet up, bless her heart, served euphemistically named snacks and beverages. Her co-worker had announced that the scintillating array of beverages from which we might choose included spicy tomato juice.

I latched onto that choice, and repeated the alluring name proudly back to the attendant. Only to have her correct me by barking, “Bloody Mary mix.” Well, yes, I did know that was what the other attendant meant by spicy juice. But, good little boy that I am, I was only repeating what we had been told to ask for . . . .

Whereupon Steve asked for tomato juice (?!), and a can of it, if possible, only to be informed in another bark, “No tomato juice. Bloody Mary mix. And I can’t give you a can.” So when he muttered under his breath, “She should retire,” I could hardly disagree, attempts at understanding notwithstanding. I did wonder, watching the attendant dispense food and drink, how difficult it must be for any of us as we age to do this kind of work, especially in a tiny enclosed space hurtling through air at several hundred miles per hour.

I wouldn’t like to be doing such work, and I haven’t yet reached 60. If people have to continue shlepping beverages and snacks on airplanes after that age, surely it’s time for our society to offer our elders better work, better opportunities, in their aging years. And perhaps the airlines should be thinking about bigger posteriors, decrepit backs and legs, and muddled heads, as some of us age.

All of these reflections grew sharper as we sat next to a delightful elderly person on the next leg of the trip. I don’t believe she can have flown much recently, since she retained the manners of a bygone era of flyers, especially when offered that scintillating selection of euphemistically named snacks: peanuts or cinnamon cookies.

She responded to the choice with all the courtly dignity of a grande dame at a cordon bleu establishment: “And what do you recommend?” The flight attendant looked nonplussed, and well she might have: how often does she get a question like that? She hemmed and hawed and allowed as how she was partial to the biscuits.

Where our traveling companion sat yesterday, I may be in a year or so, hitting up the flight attendant for a recommendation regarding the “snack.” I hope that, if I do choose the package with three delicious peanuts in it, which invariably rips apart and sends said peanuts skittering, some kind soul might offer me an extra cinnamon biscuit—and perhaps a whole can of juice, wonder of wonders!, to wash down the wee dry snack.

+ + + + +

Because I’m so often critical of faith communities for their inability to welcome and affirm some of God’s children, I want to make a point of applauding an initiative of faith leaders in California in the wake of proposition 8. A report on Clerical Whispers blog yesterday noted that the California Council of Churches, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, and the Unitarian Universalist Church have filed a writ, along with Episcopal Bishops J. Jon Bruno and Marc Andrus, to seek an injunction blocking the implementation of proposition 8
(http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/11/bishops-in-bid-to-overturn-proposition.html).

These faith leaders stress that removing rights from a targeted group of citizens endangers the rights of everyone, faith groups included. Once the precedent is set whereby a majority of citizens can vote away the rights of any group of citizens, what is to stop the majority from targeting a religious body and removing its rights?

As Rev. Edwin Bacon, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, observes, “Standing for marriage equality is just another opportunity for us to live out the gospel”—an opportunity that puts faith communities “on the right side of history on this important civil rights issue.”

It seems to me very important to keep in mind that human rights are the central issue with proposition 8: allowing a majority vote to remove rights protected by the Constitution from any group of citizens is a dangerous precedent. And it’s a troubling precedent, when some faith communities played a large role in this battle to target a minority community and remove a right from that community. It’s a precedent that ought to concern all people of faith in our nation.

Being a believer is, at its best, about protecting those on the margins and drawing them in; it is not about savaging and excluding those on the margins. When communities of faith engage in such savaging and excluding, they court similar behavior towards themselves.

+ + + + +

And in the “Weeping in Gethsemane” category, another story from Clerical Whispers catches my eye. This one is astonishing. Clerical Whispers notes that the controversial Catholic bishop of Motherwell, Scotland, Joseph Devine, recently had his episcopal mansion bulldozed and has begun the erection of a new mansion to the tune of £650,000
(http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/11/church-bulldoze-bishops-mansion-to-make.html).

Bishop Devine did not, it goes without saying, consult his flock before he made this decision (albeit the flock pay his bills): he informed them in a newsletter that his former mansion was eaten up with damp and required demolition, and that he’d decided to build a new one. The snazzy new place will have three separate living quarters with each bedroom complete with an en suite bathroom. It will also have a private chapel.

The flock are, in some cases, understandably perturbed. Some church members note that the previous house was itself stately, and that it comes as a surprise that it was suddenly so consumed with damp that it had to be demolished. These church members ask how the good bishop cannot have seen the damp before it became so bad that he had no choice except to demolish and rebuild.

This is not the first time that Bishop Devine has gotten bad press for capricious use of church funds, according to Clerical Whispers. In 2005, he received criticism for using church money on a fireworks display at Carfin Pilgrimage Centre in Lanarkshire, Scotland. And in 2000, the Sunday Mail reported that Devine had had a nose job with insurance paid for by his parishioners.

Why notice Bishop Devine’s dubious use of church funds? He belongs, after all, to a church (my church) in which bishops never have to account for their disposition of funds, and never have to consult those who donate those funds before making major financial decisions. He belongs to a church whose feudal system places absolute power in the hands of those at the top, who can use our donations to pay off and silence victims of clerical sexual abuse without informing us that this is how they choose to use our donations. Or who can use our donations to sponsor websites and publish ads that are thinly disguised advertisements for a particular political candidate or party, regardless of whether we approve of these political endorsements . . . .

I want to focus attention on Bishop Devine because he has taken it on himself several times in recent months to attach gay people. He has attracted international attention for his homophobic stands.

As a previous posting of mine notes, last March Bishop Devine informed the public that gay people have no right to regard ourselves as a persecuted minority or to ask for commemoration in Holocaust remembrance services—though gays were among the groups put into concentration camps and murdered in Nazi Germany (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/week-in-review-catholic-bishop-denies.html).

I am paying attention to Bishop Devine because we who are gay all too often have the experience of being lambasted by church figures whose moral foundation garments turn out to be rather akimbo, even as they ride moral high horses to denounce us. It often happens that faith leaders who make a name for themselves by targeting gay human beings turn out, on close inspection, to have houses that are not quite in order.

Perhaps if the churches are truly concerned about the moral fraying of our culture, they should be turning their attention to the Bishop Devines of the world and not to gay people. Perhaps they should be turning their attention to the shoddy stewardship of money donated by the faithful that has become so commonplace we are hardly shocked by it any longer. I suspect that wheeling and dealing with the donations of the faithful causes quite a bit more weeping in Gethsemane than do the lives of struggling gay human beings who are simply trying to live decently and uprightly in a world that places many obstacles in our way.

Some of us have been weeping in Gethsemane longer than Cardinal Stafford appears to realize (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/11/weeping-in-gethsemane-american-catholic.html).

Late-Breaking News: Why Some Americans Aren't Celebrating

Just seeing Shaun Jacob Halper’s article “Why Some Americans Don’t Have a Reason to Celebrate” as I do a final sweep of news sites today (www.huffingtonpost.com/shaun-jacob-halper/why-some-americans-dont-h_b_141830.html). Key excerpts:

Sorry to be the buzz-kill at the liberal victory-party, but this election has been a historic nightmare for millions of gay Americans. In Florida, Arizona, and California propositions have been passed to amend state constitutions, permanently enshrining second-class citizenship into law. America has taken a tremendous step backward -- actively revoking rights granted to citizens by state constitutions -- though you'd never know it from most of the punditry and pontificating.

+ + + + +

To be sure, this is not the media's fault. But its reticence on the uneven nature of American progress is strikingly naive and delusional, especially given the overwhelming--though not singularly determinative--role that African-Americans played in supporting Prop 8 and denying other Americans their civil rights. While seventy percent of self-identified gays and lesbians supported the first African-American presidential candidate (according to the exit poll reported by CNN), seventy percent of African American voters approved Prop 8, compared to 53% of Latino voters, 49% of white voters, and 49% of Asian voters.

The Obama victory was undoubtedly historic and groundbreaking, but it has come at a price: the aggrandizement and intensification of hostility between Blacks and gays. The irony is as ugly as it is heartbreaking. The betrayal gays feel can be summed up pithily: how is the outlawing of same sex marriage any different from the anti-miscegenation laws of segregation? Some may point to religious values as the discriminating factor, but "Christian values" were used to justify anti-miscegenation just as they are now used to justify the revoking of same-sex marriage. Hiding behind the Church, then and now, does not absolve anyone of their complicity in discrimination.

But the failure to defeat Prop 8 does not lie with the Black community or any other minority. It is the gay community who has failed to build coalitions with other groups. Wake-up call to gay leadership: We must form institutional alliances with other minority communities and start supporting each others interests. We are not going to see these groups support our right to marry if we do not make an active effort to support them as well.

Yep. Lots of pain out there. And I hope somebody’s listening. If not, it’s going to erupt very quickly into some ugly problems for this new administration—as its originators in the religious and political right intend for it to do.

Ongoing Struggle for Civil Rights and New Strategies of Gay Bashing by Religious Right

Lest anyone think that the anti-gay votes of two days ago should concern only the gay community, the New York Times chose today to focus its lead editorial on the implications of those votes for the nation at large (www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/opinion/06thu1.html?th&emc=th). The editorial notes the heart-breaking irony of an election that shattered one barrier to full inclusion for a minority group, while creating new barriers for yet another marginalized group of citizens:

Even as the nation shattered one barrier of intolerance, we were disappointed that voters in four states chose to reinforce another. Ballot measures were approved in Arkansas, Arizona, Florida and California that discriminate against couples of the same sex.

We do not view these results as reason for despair. Struggles over civil rights never follow a straight trajectory, and the ugly outcome of these ballot fights should not obscure the building momentum for full equality for gay people, including acceptance of marriage between gay men and women. But the votes remind us of how much remains to be done before this bigotry is finally erased.

Much remains to be done. Clearly, one significant task we face as a nation is education. When the majority chooses discrimination, we need education to help these citizens understand that voting away rights for any group is dangerous for all citizens.

One of the primary reasons anti-gay votes must be of concern to citizens everywhere is that the decision to take away rights from one group sets a precedent for removal of rights from other groups. A nation committed to—indeed, founded on—the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights by virtue of being human cannot accord some citizens fewer rights than it accords others. It cannot do so, that is, without undermining the notion of inalienable rights for everyone. It cannot do so without courting the erosion of the rights of every citizen once the precedent for removing rights has been established.

As the Times editorial notes, people’s fundamental rights should not be subject to popular vote. They are established by the constitution that binds us together (constitutes us) as a nation. They are safeguarded by judicial decisions that apply and uphold the constitution regardless of popular opinion:

Apart from creating legal uncertainty about the thousands of same-sex marriages that have been performed in California and giving rise to lawsuits challenging whether the rules governing ballot measures were properly followed, the immediate impact of Tuesday’s rights-shredding exercise is to underscore the danger of allowing the ballot box to be used to take away people’s fundamental rights.

Had the people of the red-state South who have just voted against the first African-American ever elected president been permitted to vote on whether African Americans should have full human rights in the 1950s and 1960s, the popular majority against those rights would have been overwhelming. And would have been just as immoral and untenable as the majorities that passed anti-gay legislation two days ago.

An editorial in today’s Tufts University student newspaper underscores these points (www.tuftsdaily.com/1.898024):

This amendment [i.e., Proposition 8 in California] targets a single group to intentionally obstruct one of its freedoms. That is not democracy; that is rule by mob and fear — something the founders desperately sought to prevent . . . .

This is discrimination. In fact, it’s one of the last “acceptable” forms of discrimination in our society. Past generations fought a Civil War, marched in the streets and pushed for equal legislation, and since then, much has changed. But this vote shows us just how far we have left to go . . . .

The passing of Proposition 8 must be viewed with the importance and gravity that was attached to previous civil rights clashes. This is undoubtedly just as important. As such, we condemn the passing of Proposition 8 and urge the California Supreme Court to overturn this discriminatory amendment.

The passing of Proposition 8 must be viewed with the importance and gravity that was attached to previous civil rights clashes: that is absolutely correct. But it will take hard work to convince many mainstream Americans that the struggle for LGBT civil rights is part and parcel of a continuous narrative of struggle for civil rights in the U.S.—as the Times and the Tufts editorials both rightly note that it is—rather than a struggle for "special rights" on the part of a minority not deserving of those rights.

There is an exceptionally strong countervailing force in this educational battle now, and significant indicators that this force has been heartened by the election. Ironically, an election in which the religious right and neoconservative ideology appear to have been decisively defeated is sparking renewed determination to use the gay rights struggle as the flashpoint for a battle of bitter resistance to the agenda of change promised by the new administration.

Without intentional resistance to that strategy by the new administration and those who elected it, the mandate for change that gave such heart to the gay community may now usher in a period of renewed stigmatization and marginalization of gay citizens.

Pam Spaulding suggests this with her usual lucidity today (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8036). As she suggests,

The election is over and the religious right is still hungry, its fangs still dripping with the blood of the carcass of civil rights that it has consumed with the passage of the anti-gay ballot initiatives. Even as it savors the win, it is hunting for its next prey—states without marriage amendments, and states that extended civil marriage via court ruling.

As Spaulding notes, growing indicators of a renewed gay-bashing strategy by the religious right ought to spur the gay community to develop a plan of counter-resistance—and to refrain from the circular firing squad so dear to progressives’ hearts when something goes wrong in our movements. As it clearly did in this election—and I plan to return to Spaulding’s points in a later post about the role of the African-American community in passing proposition 8. Discussion of this topic is heating up in the blogsphere and media, and it deserves careful analysis.

Patricia Nell Warren expresses concerns similar to Pam Spaulding's in a powerful posting yesterday at Bilerico (www.bilerico.com/2008/11/but_now_comes_the_hard_part.php#more). Warren also predicts renewed gay-bashing by a religious right heartened by its “victories” on Tuesday, at the same time that it is smarting from a resounding defeat at the national level represented by the Democratic sweep in the election:

The religious right, and the more conservative Republicans, will make every effort to drag Obama's administration down. We will see a continuation of the dirty campaigning -- the throwing of any old piece of dirt and road-kill they can get their hands on -- the looking for some excuse to impeach Obama on some issue or other. These efforts will get the ongoing support by the same conservative major media that did everything they could to slant things against Obama during the election.

Warren notes that the effort to drag Obama’s administration down will center on a “rising tide of efforts” to further the marginalization of gay Americans:

For LGBT people, the hardest part of all, will be the rising tide of efforts to legislate us into oblivion. Reading the religious-right press this morning, I see that they are quite happy with the statewide election results on individual "moral" issues, to the point where they seem okay with having gotten that victory instead of victory for McCain.

As Warren also notes, the success of the attempt to push against this cruel utilitarian use of a stigmatized community will depend in large part on whether the new president intends to cash in his promises to defend the rights of gay Americans. Those promises will be sorely tested as heat is turned up by the religious right and its allies in an attempt to undermine the new administration:

When Obama courageously mentioned the word "gay" in his speech last night, I'm sure that he meant it in the passions of that magic moment. But the new President will have to get on board with us as far as full protection of our citizenship rights. If he doesn't, the "yes, we can" slogan doesn't mean squat for LGBT people. So we'll have to hope that Obama and his administration are really prepared to get down and fight for us.

For Obama, going all the way on our rights might be the hard part.

Meanwhile, gay people of faith will be delighted to hear that Mormon and Catholic leaders in the past several days have noted their concern for our welfare, According to a Salt Lake Tribune article yesterday, Elder L. Whitney Clayton of the LDS Presidency of the Seventy, has generously stated that Mormons now want to reach out to their gay brothers and sisters battered by the LDS spearheading of the proposition 8 fight and “heal any rifts caused by the emotional campaign by treating each other with ‘civility, with respect and with love’” (www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_10907306).

Those heartwarming words are echoed by the current head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—that is, of the American arm of the other church that donated lavish resources to removing the rights of gay citizens in California this week. In his congratulatory statement to Mr. Obama, Cardinal Francis George writes, “We stand ready to work with you in defense and support of the life and dignity of every human person” (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/11/catholic-bishops-congratulate-obama-on.html).

The dignity of every human person. Civility, respect, and love. What heartwarming words!

Curiously enough, though, I’m not reading anything on blogs of gay citizens and our friends and family to indicate jubilation that Mormons and Catholics are so intent to safeguard our dignity, since they respect and love us. Strangely enough, it feels otherwise, somehow, as if what these churches set out to do and accomplished in California is about an assault on human dignity based in anything but civility, respect, and love.

We do have work to do now as a nation. And God help us, empty promises and lying words aren't going to get us there. Not even when those words drip unctuously from the mouths of religious leaders.

Hallelujah, The Work Begins

We're all awash in a sea of words today, and I'm loath to add my few drops to the sea.

Still, much remains to be said, because much remains to be done. Everything remains to be done. For those of us who have been starved for a better America, there is a clear mandate for change, and what needs to be changed won't change itself. It demands our work. As Robert Borosage says on Huffington Post, "Hallelujah. And now the work begins" (www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/amazing-grace-hallelujah_b_141054.html).

Borosage is among many folks who will now be giving the new president advice. As he himself notes, the mainstream media have already mounted a spin narrative suggesting that the mandate for change is a centrist one. The mainstream media (and, more importantly, the corporate world that owns the media and their mavens) do not want Obama to change things significantly.

In Borosage's view, this spin narrative distorts what the mandate is all about. It's clear that a majority of Americans are hungry and thirsty for real change, for substantive change. Borosage calls on the new president to step up to the plate and recognize the full extent of the mandate he's just been given:

Govern from the center? Americans voted overwhelmingly for change. And to be successful, Obama will have to be bold. In reality, the center has moved. Bob Rubin now is for a large, deficit financed fiscal stimulus. Conservative SEC Chair Chris Cox now tells us "self-regulation" doesn't work, and calls for re-regulating the banks. Alan Greenspan admits his ideology blinded him to reality -- or at least that he got it wrong. "We're all populists now," says Will Marshall, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, the Wall Street wing of the party.

Mandates are not given; they are claimed. Majorities do not form; they are forged. The center is not frozen; it is molded by events, moved by leaders and movements.

For LGBT Americans across the nation, it is impossible to hear those words without thinking immediately of what the election has just said to us, as citizens, as human beings, as brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Once again, we have received clear signals from many sectors that we are second-class citizens, unwelcome brothers and sisters, demeaned persons.

It appears that the citizens of California have voted narrowly to end gay marriage. In Florida, the amendment to the state constitution to prohibit recognition of gay unions passed. In my home state of Arkansas, to our shame, we have voted through a homophobic initiated act that will prevent the placement of foster children in the homes of any unwed couple, gay or straight, though many foster children in Arkansas have no home and desperately await placement.

Much work remains to be done. Mr. Obama began the work during the election by boldly speaking about the place of gay Americans at the table, even when he took heat for doing so. He spoke out courageously in a staunch Republican community in small-town Texas, at an African-American church in Atlanta, to audiences he knew would not be receptive to this message.

And he continued to do so last night in his acceptance speech, in which he states,

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

As Brian Juergens notes today on AfterElton, "This is the first time an elected President has chosen to speak to the topic of diversity in sexual identity in his victory speech" (www.afterelton.com/blog/brianjuergens/barack-obama-includes-gay-americans-victory-speech; emphasis added).

Mr. Obama can be assured that those of us who are gay, who have worked hard for his election, who have given lavishly to his campaign, whose hopes for his victory have run high, will continue to remind him of what he has said repeatedly up to last evening: we belong, too. We count, too. We want to contribute, and we have to have the unjust barriers to our inclusion removed, in order to make our contribution.

For us, the victory celebrations have been bittersweet. On the one hand, we rejoice in the possibility that we will be hated, demeaned, excluded a little less in the America now coming into being. On the other hand, our joy at the significant victory of Mr. Obama and other Democrats around the nation cannot help being undermined by the results of those ugly initiatives in many states singling us out once again.

As Emma Ruby-Sachs notes on the 365Gay blog early this morning,

Against all odds it looks like the state I just spent four days sweating for will go Obama. And now that I am out of the crowds outside I find it hard to celebrate at all. Yes, Obama won, but I, and many of my friends, lost. We may have a Black man as president, but this is obviously not a country that embraces equality (www.365gay.com/blog/ruby-sachs-how-am-i-supposed-to-celebrate; emphasis added).

How can one avoid reaching that conclusion--this is not a country that embraces equality--when states like California and Florida simultaneously voted for Barack Obama and against gay rights? In other words, even among Mr. Obama's supporters, those beside whom gay citizens have toiled hard for this victory, there are those for whom the mandate to change represents a call for continued subordination of LGBT citizens.

Lest we who are gay in Arkansas are in any doubt about that fact, we awoke today to read on the blog of the Arkansas Times the following exchange by two citizens of our state last night (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/11/oh_what_a_night.aspx#comments):

LeavingSoon: If Arkansas passes Act one, my wife and I (married in CA in July) will be moving out of state. The DOMA is bad enough, and we will not stay in a state that thinks we're fine for our tax money, but the rest of us is shit.

It's a shame, because we're both highly paid professionals and pay singles taxes. I'm an educator and have taught thousands of your college kids over the 10 years I have lived here. I am nationally known; I have brought almost a million dollars in grant money to the state; I have brought in half a million in tourist dollars through my work.

No more. We're not staying here. I'm tired of this.

Chasv: Leaving soon, don't let the door hit you in your arse. In other words run don't walk.

The respondent, chasv, is a Christian, by the way, and a staunch one. He has repeatedly informed contributors to this blog that he knows Jesus and walks with God and is saved.

And as Wayne Besen concludes today, "More than any year I can remember, there is a razor thin line between feelings of exhilaration and desperation [in the gay community]" (www.365gay.com/opinion/besen-end-the-popular-vote-on-civil-rights; emphasis added).

Silence despite the sea of words that will now wash over the nation, with advice of every sort for the new president? I don't think so. We have miles to go before we sleep--at least, before we sleep peacefully.

The Battle for Hope: An All Souls' Meditation (and Plea)

It’s ironic that I have been blogging about hope. Hope is, for me, the hardest virtue of all. Charity I can work at. Faith is just there—sort of.

But hope? It’s hard for me to muster. Hope is for me what Emily Dickinson so aptly described—"the thing with feathers" that sings in our souls, elusive and hard to catch when we try to pinpoint its location inside. Specifically, it’s hard to muster a strong sense that things can be different, better.

I’m almost afraid to say these things on this blog. For two reasons: first, I don’t want to daunt anyone else’s spirits; and second, I fear coming across as plaintive, and in that sense, playing into the hands of those who want to identify all gay voices as disordered and querulous.

But as the masthead for the blog says, when I started Bilgrimage, I committed myself to telling the truth at all costs, even when the truth is uncomfortable—and uncomfortable for me first and foremost. This blog is me on pilgrimage with anyone else who wants to journey along, towards truth that needs to be spoken but doesn't get told.

Perhaps it would help if I sketched as sharply as possible where these reflections are coming from. The piece I posted a few weeks ago, an open letter to the U.S. bishops about the rise of violence in our political discourse (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/open-letter-to-us-catholic-bishops-on.html)? I cross-posted it to the blog café at National Catholic Reporter’s website.

In the past week, a blogger has responded to it. He upbraids me for believing reports of hate rhetoric at Palin rallies. He tells me these stories have been debunked. He says no hate has been manifested at these rallies.

And I have to admit, I’m daunted by these statements. I’m daunted not because I believe for a moment they’re true. I’m daunted because it seems there is a significant proportion of people in our nation and faith communities who will believe red is blue no matter how compelling the evidence otherwise is.

This does me in. I don’t know how to talk to people like that. I don’t know how to talk to anyone in a world in which clear communication can be so systemically distorted that people can look at videos of some of the rallies I’ve referenced and not see hatred on the faces at those rallies.

And not be concerned about that hate. As citizens. As people of faith. And dismiss and attack that concern when it comes from other citizens and other people of faith.

To make the point sharper, I have to go a bit deeper. The blogger in question is someone who has been responding to me (and I to him) on the NCR blog café for some time. From previous conversations, I’ve learned that he promotes the leading Catholic "ex-gay" group Courage. I have reason to believe that he supports the idea—well, let’s be frank: that he accepts the lie—that people can be “cured” of their homosexuality. He has implied, though has not said this outright, that he is among those who have been so cured.

I am feeling the dialogue with this blogger at a personal level, and it’s a level of pain. The pain has to do with the sense that nothing I say, do, or write will ever be enough—in a world in which what is so clearly a lie is not merely believed by large numbers of people of faith, but actively used to attack others. And with the blessing of churches. The lie about which I'm speaking here is, of course, the lie about sexual orientation, that it is not a given of our personal constitution from birth.

It is hard enough to be accused of being a liar when you are testifying to what you know is true: that those faces of some people at some McCain-Palin rallies are distorted by hate; that some people at some of these rallies have shouted violent hate slogans; that those leading the rallies have been silent about the hatred and violence; that the pastoral leaders of my church and many other churches have been silent in the face of such growing hatred, and have even made common cause with those promoting the hatred.*

It is hard enough to be accused of being a liar when you are testifying to what you know to be true in your own life, your experience, your bones: that people are born gay or straight; that it is exceedingly cruel to try to convince us that we are made wrong by God and should be remade by psychiatrists and churches; that our fate as human beings should depend on our willingness to turn such cruelty against ourselves and believe lies about our very nature in order to fit in.

But it is even harder when those telling lies seem to triumph. I have lived for many years now in a world in which it appears that many churches not only shield homophobes, but actually reward them. I continue to see that dynamic play out in many mainstream churches—for instance, in the United Methodist Church, where there is clear evidence that a former boss of Steve’s and mine made our lives hellacious primarily because of her belief that gay folks are second-class human beings. And where she has recently been given another nice reward by her church for her homophobia.

I am tired, frankly. I’m tired of trying to muster hope.

As a result, I’m not doing very well for myself or for those around me. I am letting my health slip away, as I give up on trying to exercise and to control weight. Haven’t been to the doctor for a check up (or any other reason) in over a year now. Have no health coverage, and can’t afford to go to the doctor.

Sometimes it just seems better, frankly, to give in to ill health as I age, just to accept the messages that unemployment, lack of health coverage, and persistent experiences of discrimination keep giving me: I really don’t count a lot in the grand scheme of things. Try as I will, I’ll be called a liar even when I speak plain truth, and that label will stick even when it comes from people of faith who employ blatant lies to make it stick.

And who then receive rewards from churches for whom bashing a gay person is a badge of honor—churches whose fundamental messages to gay human beings is that we are full of sin and unwelcome, despite empty rhetoric about open hearts and open minds. Otherwise, how could those churches keep bashing gay human beings while honoring those who bash us, if they wished to give any other message than this to us?

The situation in which that homophobic boss now rewarded by the Methodist church has placed us is one in which we watch money slip away each month over and beyond the amount we are losing from retirement funds due to the recession. We watch the money slip away because our combined incomes don’t cover expenses, with the additional house note we’re forced to pay as a result of promises the homophobic boss made to lure us to work with her, and then broke when it became expedient to get rid of us.

I don’t want to complain. I am not sharing these personal details in order to engage anyone’s sympathy.

I am sharing them to be honest about my own struggle to find hope—about the precise place where that struggle arises in my life as a gay man trying to hold on to faith in the face of systemic lies and systemic cruelty in the Christian churches. I am sharing these thoughts in order to be honest about the precise place in which I need to find hope, if it’s to be found.

I'm not sure if many of those now seeing hope in this election cycle reflect on the unique situation in which gay and lesbian Americans find ourselves, as we watch poll numbers rise in support of homphobic initiatives like proposition 8 in California or amendment 2 in Florida. We are certainly full of hope.

At the same time, our hope is mixed with pain—with the pain of knowing that we may be bashed yet again by the vote for such initiatives, with the pain of knowing that, in fact, a not insignificant number of those going to the polls to elect Mr. Obama will also vote for these homophobic initiatives, because they believe they are compelled to do so by their religious faith.

The hope we who are LGBT look for in the coming elections is mixed with the pain of knowing that for a large number of American Christians, we are and should remain second-class citizens: we should expect limited human rights; we should expect to be lied about and lied to by people of faith, who believe they are doing God's will in abusing us. And who will be rewarded by their churches when they behave in this way, churches that will use any tactic available, including legal threats, to try to keep the testimony of gay believers from being heard.

Part of reaching for hope is listening to others who offer resources for hope in times of struggle. Any suggestions from anyone? Surely I am not the only gay person in the world battling to find hope in the midst of such struggles.

*Yesterday's Politico website carries an article by David Paul Kuhn showing overwhelming support for McCain-Palin among whites who attend church regularly, except among white Catholics: www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15165.html.

Ethics, Ethics Everywhere--and Ne'er a Drop to Drink

Saturday morning tidbits, while I scan the news worried about my uncle and cousin in Houston—my cousin not answering emails as of early evening yesterday. The news from Galveston sounds grim, with 40% of the island’s population refusing to evacuate, and flood waters rising quickly and high as the backside of the storm arrived.

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And a grim story in another vein altogether in the news today: a church in South Africa firing a gay man, then apologizing to him (when he took them to court) and saying “we never had the intention to hurt you or to offend you” (www.capeargus.co.za/?fSectionId=3571&fArticleId=vn20080912060552348C874554).

How in God’s name do church people make statements like that with a straight face?

How do they live with themselves when they behave so atrociously towards gay brothers and sisters?

We never had the intention to hurt you or to offend you:

Nah. Doesn’t hurt at all to be out of a job solely because you’re gay.

To be lied about and lied to by church people who fire you after you’ve worked extremely hard—solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

Doesn’t hurt at all to see your meager retirement savings eaten up when you can’t find work, after church folks have fired you solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

Doesn’t hurt one bit to have your reputation destroyed by church folks who believe they have the moral high road in treating you like dirt, solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

Not a bit of pain in the experience of having good church folks kneel beside you at the communion rail one day and then kick you to the curb the next, solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

No hurt at all in being excluded from Christian community, from fellowship, from spiritual resources—because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

Doesn’t hurt being without health insurance, and thus not going to the doctor because you can’t afford to, even when you need medical care.

Doesn’t hurt a whit to see the folks who have done this to you drawing salaries, with benefits and reputations intact, though they’ve orchestrated campaigns of smears and lies, even while living in glass houses—solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

It’s not painful at all to have talents and the desire to use them, to be of service to others, and be shut by church folks out of that opportunity—yep, solely because they can do so, when you’re gay and they want to be rid of you.

The full story is at the link given above. The church in question is a Dutch Reformed Church. The person fired was a music teacher Johan Strydom (imagine discovering a gay church musician or music teacher!). The church’s apology came after Strydom took the church to court and won an apology and damages.

Even in apologizing, the church letter kicks Strydom, telling him he can’t expect to work in a church, because he’s supposed to be a spiritual leader—and openly gay folks can’t be that . . . .

Reminds me very much of that hug-smack dynamic analysts of the United Methodist approach to gay folks noted following this year following General Conference: I love you; but I don't love you enough to love you, to include you, to welcome you, to affirm you, to make use of your talents (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/white-eyelet-lace-florida-umc-annual.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/good-gays-bad-gays-continued-smack-hug.html).

I don't love you enough to overlook who you are as I "love" you.

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Further shocking news: in the Department of Interior scandal about which I blogged yesterday, it’s now turning out that right before the news of gross ethical lapses in the Department broke, the federal Office of Government Ethics gave the Department one of its 2008 Education and Communication Awards (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/washingtonpostinvestigations/2008/09/day_before_oil_sex_scandal_eme.html).

Yes, you’ve read right. The Department whose employees were sleeping with oil-company reps, taking drugs, accepting illegal kick-backs and feathering their nests out of federal coffers: yes, that Department.

Yes. An Education and Communication Award.

Yes. From the federal Office of Government Ethics.

The scintillating achievements of the Interior Department, which won them the Government Ethics award? Well, they developed “a dynamic laminated Ethics Guide for employees" that was a "polished, professional guide" with "colorful pictures and prints which demand employees' attention." Oh, and this picture book was small enough for employees to carry (though one wonders if it was perhaps not legible, albeit a picture book, given the ethical lapses now documented in the Department).

Oooh. Colorful pictures. And prints. Hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of this story.

And, sadly, it’s an all-too-believable story. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been involved in preparations for accreditation visits in colleges/universities, where the whole, ultimate, only goal was to develop “dynamic laminated” guides with “colorful pictures and prints.”

Conceptual frameworks so absurdly inflated and so divorced from reality that anyone looking at them would be stunned—as long as (s)he doesn’t inquire too closely into the actual conditions the framework is disguised to conceal. Big, bright, shiny displays of “documents” hobbled together, with colorful covers designed to conceal the paucity of accurate information inside.

That’s what academic life has come to. And accrediting bodies let colleges/universities get away with the pretty show-and-tell game. In fact, administrators who actually try to document claims made in the pretty picture books—laborious work requiring careful attention to detail, to reality, to the accuracy of a college’s claims as measured against accreditation expectations—are apt to find themselves soundly punished for the time they invest in that work.

It’s a diversion, you see, from the real task, which is to design those nifty conceptual frameworks so intricate that the accreditation team will bow in awe at your expertise (and refrain from asking inconvenient reality-based questions). The real task is to create a pretty collection of documents with pretty covers and pretty colored drawings and charts inside.

If this is how academic life functions today—and colleges and universities get away with it; I know, I’ve been there—is it any wonder that government agencies follow suit? Who produces the values-oriented graduates that fill the jobs in those government departments, after all?

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Another tidbit: in October last year, I posted at the National Catholic Reporter blog café site about a Pennsylvania-based Catholic group called the Society for Tradition, Family, and Property (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337#comment-18563). As that posting notes, Steve and I visited his family last October and found that this group had organized a 50-state effort to have Catholics pray the Rosary in public processions. Though this was supposedly a commemoration of the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, many of the marchers in these processions carried signs with overt right-wing political content as they prayed.

My NCR posting notes that I’m suspicious of the attempt of this right-wing Catholic organization (which rejects the bulk of the peace-justice teachings of the Catholic magisterium) to get Catholics into the public square as the federal elections near. The website of the Society for Tradition, Family, and Property is downright homophobic. It links to an article suggesting that the "moral decay" of New Orleans (read: infestation with gays) actually caused Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans.

My NCR comments also note that, in my view, these public demonstrations organized by the Society for Tradition, Family, and Property have a fascist edge to them. They are an attempt to dupe faithful Catholics who are not highly politicized except around the abortion issue, and who don't necessarily buy into the homophobic agenda. Their real objective is to get such Catholics to the polls so that they will vote “right” in the coming elections, and to engage the support of Catholics for causes besides abortion, including banning of gay marriage, in underhanded ways.

I said all that last October. And yesterday, I read on Pam’s House Blend blog that none other than the Pennsylvania-based Catholic group of the Society for Tradition, Family, and Property is now demonstrating in California on behalf of the proposition to outlaw gay marriage (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=52F098258F2308C0081CBBFD3AB76764?diaryId=6974).

And its scary, overt fascist overtones are being recognized by California citizens, who report that the marchers seem to be out of a Hitler Youth rally, and are clearly part of a fascist hate group.

Well—deep breath—welcome to the nation coming into being if the theocratic slate gets voted into office in November. If that’s the choice we make, I hope we are ready, because we’ll surely be getting what we deserve when these red-caped marchers wearing lions’ pins caper in the streets to celebrate their victory.

White and Right: The Weight of Christian History

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in recent weeks, as the influence of the religious right in American politics wanes. The trend is an increasing—and increasingly shrill—emphasis on that movement’s support of the civil rights of African Americans, as opposed to its resistance to the notion that LGBT Americans deserve civil rights.

This is all the religious right has left, frankly: the possibility that it can engineer deep resentments and suspicions of LGBT Americans, in order to get the faithful into the voting booth in the coming elections, and to assure that the faithful will pull the right lever. If the price to be paid for drumming out the vote is a little lie here and there—as in, the religious right has promoted and supported the civil rights of African Americans—what’s that, in the grand scheme of things? When we’re fighting devils, God surely winks at our picayune misstatements, no?

The argument for the noble intentions of the religious right in the area of civil rights for African Americans has gotten so ludicrously divorced from reality and fact in recent public discourse that some rhetoricians are even suggesting that William F. Buckley invented civil rights! William F. Buckley: the mater si magistra no man, who rejected Catholic social teaching about human rights; the man who told us that his job is to stand astride history and shout no. The man who hissed at Gore Vidal in a t.v. interview in my youth, calling him a vicious queer, or words to that effect . . . .

This is the noble inventor of civil rights for African Americans. Not Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks, or Sojourner Truth. William F. Buckley, with that patrician drawl of the social elite of the Northeast, the disdainful frozen face that barely suppressed his distaste for the base-born opponents he sought to decimate over the years.

I’m thinking today of these ludicrous claims of the religious right, and the willingness of members of this movement to depart from the truth in the service of the right, in light of yesterday’s California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Already, the blogs are popping with fireworks provided by the religious right. This is going to be a useful tool, they think, for getting out the righteous vote in the coming elections. It will play well (they assume) in the heartland, with its churches of the radical middle.

And perhaps it will. If so, I hope that those churches begin counting the cost of their refusal to oppose the lies and tricks of those with whom they’ve cast their lot politically and theologically, in this ugly use of gay and lesbian persons to make political points.

What interests me in particular is the willingness of fundies to log onto even liberal websites in the past day, to spread disinformation about and hate for gay people—in the name of Christ, of course. The weblogs are full of Leviticus today. They’re peppered with scriptural quotations. They’re dripping with spite.

I have racked my brain to think of any comparable cases in recent American history, in which people purporting to speak for the churches feel so free to vent hate and tell lies, in the name of Christ (of course). I remember some of this from my youth, growing up in the middle of the struggle against segregation in the American South. I remember the lurid fliers that circulated in my school when integration finally happened, with their pictures of blond white Southern girls dancing with black men, the ultimate nightmare of the Christian South.

I remember the dire warnings of what was going to happen to Christian civilization if we permitted the racial line to be crossed—the interracial mingling that would take place, the mongrel race that would ensue, the infection of the toilets of pious white Christian school children by hordes of dirty immoral black children who would pour into the schools when they were integrated.

And I remember the use of the bible to support all of this venomous hatred—the lies, the distortions, the lurid warnings about lines that must not be crossed if we wished to maintain our Christian culture. I remember the discussion in my own church, in which the bible was used by some members of the church as a weapon against anyone who proposed that we had hardly built an admirable Christian culture around the practice of racial exclusion.

In other words, I remember what the fathers and mothers, the grandfathers and grandmothers, of the current religious right were doing some forty and fifty years ago, to—well, as they now say—to promote the civil rights of African Americans. As I recall this not-so-distant history, I have to wonder why African Americans like Crystal Dixon, the University of Toledo H-R officer on whom I reported recently, would allow themselves to be duped by the arguments of people who decidedly do not have the best interests of African Americans at heart, and who are trying to use African Americans as pawns in ugly political games as cynically as they use gay Americans.

As I reflect on these games, I think back to the long, long history behind American support of slavery. Two factors loomed large in the social foundation of slavery. One was scripture. The other was longstanding, taken-for-granted custom. These are the same two factors being exploited by the religious right venom dispensers on blogs following the California Supreme Court decision yesterday.

Scripture: I remember a discussion Oprah had a few years ago on her talk show, with several African-American men who were adept at quoting the bible to bash gays. Oprah probed their knowledge of other portions of the bible. As she pointed out, though their knowledge of the tiny set of texts that have been used to beat gays into submission was impeccable, when it came to anything else in the bible, they had a decidedly deficient knowledge.

Love? Justice? Mercy? The 99.99% of the bible that unambiguously stands on the side of those virtues and makes them—not bashing of already stigmatized brothers and sisters—central to religious life? Oprah concluded (and told her African-American brothers this) that their use of the bible was not only selective and hateful: it was politically engineered and had long since departed from any religious intent at all.

Just as our use of the Noah and Ham story, or the New Testament admonitions for slaves to obey their masters, did in the American South of the civil rights period . . . . Oh, yes, though slavery had ended some 100 years prior to the integration struggles, we had not forgotten those useful texts about slavery, and about the need for slaves to obey.

The point being, the biblical texts are full of everything in the world. That tiny handful of texts that falls so easily out of the mouths of right-wing homophobes today, while the bunches and bunches of texts about love, justice, and mercy never reach the lips of these folks: it’s really no different from the tiny handful of which we who wanted to hold the line against African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were so certain.

We had, after all, the weight of history on our side. We had longstanding, taken-for-granted custom on our side. The bible had always been used as it was used in the American South in slave days and in the Jim Crow era. Throughout Christian history, the scriptures were used to support slavery.

Why? Because slavery existed in the culture of those who wrote the biblical texts—as did patriarchy and the subjugation of women to men. In defending slavery, Christians of the American South were not defending some aberrant, novel departure from scripture and tradition. Slavery was taken for granted by Christians because it is biblically endorsed, and because it was part of the social fabric taken for granted by the writers of the biblical texts.

We were defending what had been normative throughout most of Christian history. We were defending normative uses of scripture throughout Christian history.

Just as opponents of gay rights are today, in their use of their handful of bash-texts . . . . This misuse of scripture can seem plausible—it can go without any challenge from the churches of the radical middle, to their eternal shame—because it is bolstered by longstanding, taken-for-granted custom.

We changed our minds, we Christians of the righteous South, only when the Supreme Court forced us to do so. We changed our minds only when culture changed. Our churches did not lead cultural changes towards a more humane society.

To their shame, they carried up the rear, kicking and screaming about lines that should not be crossed, about the scriptures that have to remain intact if civilization is to endure, about “orthodoxy” and “purity” and “the truth.” Just as they do today . . . .

The churches of the radical middle will one day see the light about their hateful abuse of LGBT persons at this point in history. They will do so when culture itself changes to such an extent that they have no choice.

Then, when they rewrite history to try to imply that they led the way to gay civil rights, will anyone still be listening? Where will the descendants of this generation of advocates of “orthodoxy” be, some 100 years from now? Inside the churches of Main Street USA? Or outside them, having given up hope for the churches to stand for countercultural positions informed by ideals of love, justice, and mercy?